GreenPolicy360: As human-caused climate change threatens our future well-being, the US president again talks 'gibberish'. Donald Trump speaks here of the clean climate in the US, that is, environmental action and successes of those proceeding him, even as the US president attempts to dismantle with an 'aggressive schedule' most every significant US environmental protection program. The Trump administration abandons international climate agreements, attacks climate science, and blocks nearly every move in Congress and the courts to advance environmental protection. We are left to wonder what he means by 'good climate' or 'cleanest climate'. The environmental record of this president since his inauguration is, simply stated, a veritable disaster.

Trump: “He (Prince Charles) is really into climate change and I think that’s great. What he really wants and what he really feels warmly about is the future. He wants to make sure future generations have climate that is good climate, as opposed to a disaster, and I agree. Well, the United States right now has among the cleanest climates there are based on all statistics. And it’s even getting better because I agree with that we want the best water, the cleanest water. It’s crystal clean, has to be crystal clean clear.”

Asked by Piers Morgan if he accepted the science on climate change, Trump said: “I believe there’s a change in weather, and I think it changes both ways. Don’t forget, it used to be called global warming, that wasn’t working, then it was called climate change. Now it’s actually called extreme weather, because with extreme weather you can’t miss.”

China moves far ahead on green public transportation, the US lags behind on new economic/energy strategies while ramping up a military budget larger than the next 10 nations combined. The US announces a new generation of nuclear weapons. Russia and China realign and move to match. Economic wars and 'hot wars' are threatened and declared across the planet. We watch as the US maneuvers against Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and against Russia, China... The US puts in place sanctions and punitive actions against scores of perceived adversaries and against former allies in Europe and across the globe as treaties, agreements, cooperative talks and negotiations breakdown. Polling tracking these US actions demonstrate internationally that the world public is turning away from support of the US, now seen as a 'major threat to peace' and purveyor of a booming arms trade.

The US initiated trade war and tariffs against China are drawing a strong response (see the Bloomberg article below) and it is not a surprise that the Chinese are accelerating their Eurasian strategy, alternative global supply chains, building counter alliances, tech capabilities, and boosting their military and nuclear weapons. Alternative exchange, financial and trading systems, moving away from the dollar and petrodollar, are in process. Geo-political relationships of the past are giving way and many are asking what the latter years of the 21st century will bring as global climate impacts internationally, across interconnected environments, roll out...

How the oil industry and other polluters paid for studies to downplay climate change and give the GOP cover for inaction:

“You want to understand the climate crisis today? It’s 25 years of corruption in Washington.” -- Elizabeth Warren, campaigning for US president, May 2019

Money Talks, Opponents of U.S. Climate Action Listen

The Climate Action Now Act, passed last week by the House in a 231-190 vote, would bar the U.S. from pulling out of the 2016 Paris Agreement, the landmark accord that seeks to limit global temperature increases tied to greenhouse gas emissions. President Donald Trump announced in June 2017 that the U.S. would withdraw from the agreement. The bill would require the Trump administration to submit an annual plan for complying with the agreement, including a 26 to 28 percent reduction from 2005 greenhouse gas emission levels.

A MapLight analysis of Federal Election Campaign data found that 65 House members who opposed the measure received $268,965 from the 10 largest oil and gas companies in the U.S. since the beginning of the year. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., has received $35,300 from the fossil fuel giants since the start of the 2019-20 election cycle — the most of any lawmaker. Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-La., received $8,500 from the oil and gas companies, the most of any cosponsor. Twenty-five supporters of the legislation received a total of $78,850 from the oil and gas companies, according to FEC data.

Marathon Petroleum Corp. contributed $131,000 to lawmakers who didn’t support the bill, more than any of the top 10 U.S. companies. The Findlay, Ohio-based oil company, which publishes an annual report on the risks and opportunities presented by climate change, gave $16,750 to seven supporters of the legislation.

ExxonMobil, the world’s largest oil and gas company, gave $43,750 to 20 supporters of the climate bill, as well as $75,500 to 34 members who declined to support the measure. The Irving, Texas-based giant has vehemently denied reports that its scientists knew about the effects of greenhouse gas emissions for a half-century and took no action.

The House climate bill, sponsored by Rep. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., can now be considered by the Senate. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., however, has promised “this futile gesture to handcuff the U.S. economy through the ill-fated Paris deal will go nowhere here in the Senate.”

In the 30 years I’ve been working on this crisis, we’ve seen all 20 of the hottest years ever recorded.So far, we have warmed the earth by roughly two degrees Fahrenheit, which in a masterpiece of understatement the New York Times once described as “a large number for the surface of an entire planet.” This is humanity’s largest accomplishment, and indeed the largest thing any one species has ever done on our planet, at least since the days two billion years ago when cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) flooded the atmosphere with oxygen, killing off much of the rest of the archaic life on the planet. “Faster than expected” is the watchword of climate scientists—the damage to ice caps and oceans that scientists (conservative by nature) predicted for the end of the century showed up decades early. “I’ve never been at a climate conference where people say ‘that happened slower than I thought it would,’” one polar expert observed in the spring of 2018. At about the same time, a team of economists reported that there was a 35 percent chance that the United Nations’ previous “worst-case scenario” for global warming was in fact too optimistic. In January 2019 scientists concluded the Earth’s oceans were warming 40 percent faster than previously believed.

“We are now truly in uncharted territory ... physical threats so different in quantity that they become different in quality, their effects so far-reaching that we can’t be confident of surviving them with our civilizations more or less intact.

One is large-scale nuclear war; it’s always worth recalling J. Robert Oppenheimer’s words as he watched the first bomb test, quoting from Hindu scripture: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” So far, the cobbled-together and jury-rigged international efforts to forestall an atomic war have worked, and indeed, for much of the last 50 years those safeguards, formal and informal, have seemed to be strengthening. That we have nuclear nightmares again is mostly testimony to the childishness of President Trump and his pal in North Korea—they seem nearly alone in not understanding “why we can’t use them.”

Second on that list of threats is the small group of chemicals that, just in time, scientists discovered were eroding the ozone layer, a protective shield that 99 percent of us didn’t even know existed. Had those scientists not sounded the alarm, we would have walked blindly off a cliff—literally, in many cases, as cataracts are one of the most common symptoms of being bathed in the ultraviolet radiation that the ozone layer blocks. Within a decade, the chemical companies had ceased their obstruction and the Montreal Protocol began removing chlorofluorocarbons from the atmosphere. The ozone hole over the Antarctic now grows smaller with each decade, and now scientists expect it will be wholly healed by 2060.

And the third, of course, is climate change, perhaps the greatest of all these challenges...

This year's Earth Day is Protect Our Species and draws draw attention to rapid global destruction of species and reduction of the world's plant and wildlife populations.

"All living things have an intrinsic value, and each plays a unique role in the complex web of life. We must work together to protect endangered and threatened species."

Dwindling population sizes and range shrinkages amount to a massive anthropogenic erosion of biodiversity and of the ecosystem services essential to civilization. This biological annihilation underlines the seriousness for humanity of Earth’s ongoing sixth mass extinction event.

We now need... sustained and collaborative action with one common goal: to eliminate our carbon emissions as soon as possible and replace our dependence on coal, oil and gas with clean sources of energy that don’t produce carbon pollution. This means solutions large and small, mundane and inspiring.

Our Planet's #PlanetCitizen David Attenborough... “Fifty years ago, we didn’t even realize what the problem was. Maybe thirty years ago we did recognize what the problem was but didn’t know much about it, thinking, 'That’s way in the future'. Now we know that it’s right here ahead of us.”

"We don't know a planet like this." That was the reaction of meteorologist Eric Holthaus to news that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have reached heights not seen in the entirety of human existence -- not history, existence.

According to data from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is over 415 parts per million (ppm), far higher than at any point in the last 800,000 years, since before the evolution of homo sapiens.

The 22nd Century: Get Ready, It's Not So Far Away As You Might Think It Is

2100...

It’s a milestone year frequently cited in climate change news reports, stories about future technologies and science fiction. But it’s so far ahead, clouded with so many possibilities, that the route we will take to get there is difficult to see. I rarely consider that, like my daughter, millions of people alive today will be there as 2100 arrives, inheriting the century my generation will leave behind. All the decisions we make, for better and worse, will be theirs to live with.

Modern society is suffering from “temporal exhaustion”, the sociologist Elise Boulding once said. “If one is mentally out of breath all the time from dealing with the present, there is no energy left for imagining the future...” We can only guess her reaction to the relentless, Twitter-fuelled politics of 2019. No wonder wicked problems like climate change or inequality feel so hard to tackle right now.

That's why researchers, artists, technologists and philosophers are converging on the idea that short-termism may be the greatest threat our species is facing this century.

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New solutions are needed for a global arms control architecture.

Rethinking Arms Control... Understanding and responding to the challenges of the 21st Century.

Nations in the survey say the influence of the U.S. is a major threat to their countries, (and) more people now say it is a threat than in 2013 and 2017. Indeed, in 10 countries, roughly half or more now claim that American power is a major threat to their nation.

Via the New York Times / Rift Between Trump and Europe Is Now Open and Angry

Caltech, in partnership with the MIT School of Science, the Naval Postgraduate School, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Facing the certainty of a changing climate coupled with the uncertainty that remains in predictions of how it will change, scientists and engineers from across the country are teaming up to build a new type of climate model that is designed to provide more precise and actionable predictions.

Leveraging recent advances in the computational and data sciences, the comprehensive effort capitalizes on vast amounts of data that are now available and on increasingly powerful computing capabilities both for processing data and for simulating the Earth system.

The new model will be built by a consortium of researchers led by Caltech, in partnership with MIT; the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS); and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which Caltech manages for NASA. The consortium, dubbed the Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA), plans to fuse Earth observations and high-resolution simulations into a model that represents important small-scale features, such as clouds and turbulence, more reliably than existing climate models. The goal is a climate model that projects future changes in critical variables such as cloud cover, rainfall, and sea ice extent more accurately — with uncertainties at least half the size of those in existing models...

Glimpse the future climate in US cities via the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science

The interactive mapping uses 12 different measures to describe climate, including minimum and maximum temperature and total precipitation for winter, spring, summer and fall. Two emissions scenarios are considered – one that assumes high current emissions continue and one that assumes emissions peak mid-century and then decline. Numerous future climate forecasts are considered as generated by 27 different climate models.

“The Trump administration has been silencing science for 2 years now and pretending that climate change doesn’t exist, despite the excellent work of [its] own scientists. Trump’s SOTU was more of the same,” Joel Clement, Harvard Center for Science and International Affairs.

Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.), new chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources, tweeted, “Trump and his cronies have spent the last 2 years leaving our environmental future in the hands of the fossil fuel industry, denying #ClimateChange, and imperiling the public health of our communities.” That committee holds a hearing today on climate change impacts and the need for action.

Rep. Frank Pallone Jr.‏ (D-N.J.), new chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, tweeted, “We heard a lot of talk from @realDonaldTrump tonight on manufactured crises, but we heard nothing on one of the most important challenges of our time: #ClimateChange.” The committee holds a hearing today on addressing the environmental and economic effects of climate change.

GreenPolicy360 in Clearwater/St.Pete/Tampa, encouraging and assisting in the start-up of the new U.S. House climate change committee. Go Kathy Castor, move with all due speed ! The times demand decisive action.

“The blindness and stupidity of the politicians and their consultants is truly shocking in the face of nuclear catastrophe,” Brown said. “We know that thousands of these weapons on high alert could be launched by mistake…. We are almost like travelers on the Titanic, seeing the iceberg up ahead but enjoying the elegant dining and the music.”

“The danger and probability is mounting that there will be some kind of nuclear incident that will kill millions, if not initiating exchanges that will kill billions.”

Six milestones—in energy, transport, land use, industry, infrastructure, and finance—that would need to be met by 2020 to bend the curve in global greenhouse gas emissions and put the world on a pathway consistent with the Paris international climate agreement.

Andrew Wheeler, Trump's EPA pick says climate change 'not the greatest crisis'. The former coal lobbyist took over the EPA when his predecessor Scott Pruitt resigned after months of controversy. Wheeler says, in confirmation hearings (reported by few media outlets), that "he is carrying out the president’s “regulatory reform agenda” and that the US is the “gold standard for environmental progress”.

Via CNN / Carbon emissions increased 3.4% in 2018, marking the second-largest annual gain in more than two decades, according to preliminary power generation data analyzed by the Rhodium Group, an independent economic policy research provider... US power sector emissions as a whole rose by 1.9% and that the transportation sector "held its title as the largest source of US emissions for the third year running," due to a growth in demand for diesel and jet fuel offsetting a modest decline in gasoline use.

The lack of strategy in the country's decarbonization efforts, the research says, has contributed to the gap in meeting the goal set in the Paris Agreement on climate change, a landmark 2015 accord that the US Trump administration has promised to abandon. President Trump has at times denied the basic science of climate change, which states that burning coal, oil and natural gas produces emissions that trap heat in the atmosphere, warming the planet. But it has become increasingly clear that warming is happening faster than previously thought and with worse results.

GreenPolicy360 Siterunner: William Westermeyer writes of a science agency that was established thru the work of Congressman George E Brown, Congressman from East LA and a leader of California's initiatives in environmental science. Gingrich disbanded the US Office of Technology Assessment in the 1995, after its warning on climate change. Today, the science office to advise the president, Office of Science and Technology Policy also brought into existence by George Brown, is moribund with its science executive positions going unfilled. The president is on record saying he doesn't need the science... The nation, and world, heads into 2019 as science and guidance of visionary leaders are set aside.

Q: What are the main science questions you (JPL/Caltech/NASA) hope OCO-3 will answer?

The big science question is about the movement of carbon dioxide between plants and the atmosphere.

If you look at the ground-based data, it almost looks like the planet is breathing. Plants in the northern hemisphere take up carbon dioxide as they grow in the spring and summer, reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere by a few parts per million. In the fall, the leaves drop and carbon is released back into the air.

But every year is different. There are changes in the forests in Canada. El Niño years affect the carbon cycle.

What we want to do is find drivers of the plant uptake of carbon and use that to better predict what will happen in the future. If we have a warmer, drier climate, will plants keep taking up as much carbon?

The most striking fact about the living environment may be how little we know about it. Even the number of living species can be only roughly calculated. A widely accepted estimate by scientists puts the number at about 10 million. In contrast, those formally described, classified and given two-part Latinized names (Homo sapiens for humans, for example) number slightly more than two million. With only about 20 percent of its species known and 80 percent undiscovered, it is fair to call Earth a little-known planet.

To effectively manage protected habitats, we must also learn more about all the species of our planet and their interactions within ecosystems.

The best-explored groups of organisms are the vertebrates (mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fishes), along with plants, especially trees and shrubs. Being conspicuous, they are what we familiarly call “wildlife.” A great majority of other species, however, are by far also the most abundant. I like to call them “the little things that run the world.” They teem everywhere, in great number and variety in and on all plants, throughout the soil at our feet and in the air around us. They are the protists, fungi, insects, crustaceans, spiders, pauropods, centipedes, mites, nematodes and legions of others whose scientific names are seldom heard by the bulk of humanity. In the sea and along its shores swarm organisms of the other living world — marine diatoms, crustaceans, ascidians, sea hares, priapulids, coral, loriciferans and on through the still mostly unfilled encyclopedia of life.

Do not call these organisms “bugs” or “critters.” They too are wildlife. Let us learn their correct names and care about their safety. Their existence makes possible our own. We are wholly dependent on them.

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